The Misadventures of Doctor Shepard
by Jack Mackerel
Summary: Dr. Shepard was a simple scientist - until the Skyllian Blitz made her a scientific icon and  fake  hero, despite her protests. Now she's dragged into a nightmare after the Spectres enlist her to disable Saren's Geth army. As they say, brains over brawn.


**(( DUMB AUTHOR'S NOTES: **Consider this a one-shot for now. Since I am a dirty PS3 owner and cannot afford a gaming rig or 360, I haven't had the pleasure of playing Mass Effect 1, and I'm not even done with Mass Effect 3. I may circumvent this by watching videos of ME1, but my attention span is smaller than a Vorcha's. ))

* * *

><p>The most famous shot of Dr. Shepard is her standing triumphantly and dramatically on the wreckage of a Batarian pirate ship, Mattock in hand. Hell, the Shepard Memorial Plaza used it for the basis of their gaudy golden statue, except the Mattock was now her ever iconic machine gun (supposedly better than a Revenant, but Dr. Shepard didn't know, didn't want to know, and wondered how they ever made something that looked like a demented metal Reaper sculpture fire that much lead in a small amount of time).<p>

And every time Dr. Shepard took a look at it, her face flushed with embarrassment. On rare occasions, she ran to her cabin to puke her guts out when she so much as caught an accidental glance, or tried uselessly kicking her chair out of severe annoyance, partially because she wasn't in her equally iconic lab coat at the time and she was sure she was grimacing and looking like an idiot at the time of the photo. Partially because she was a scientist, not a soldier, dammit, and no matter how many times she said to waves of adoring crowds and reporters that Hackett, Kaidan, and Ashley were the real heroes, they just wouldn't listen. Even Ash and Kaidan kept telling her she deserved every single bit of praise, when all she had done was cower, hide, run, retreat, do research, and occasionally shoot and get lucky. Or was that unlucky? Whenever she shot for any reason at all, something ridiculous like "single-handedly mowed down a horde of angry krogan" happened, or "managed to rip Saren, trained Spectre who ate yahg for lunch and should have snapped Shepard's spine into several pieces, in half with supermachinegun fire" happened.

And occasionally, someone shot at her, and then equally ridiculous things happened, like getting resurrected by a racist, terroristical organization to rally humanity as an icon of science against a threat that got every goddamn "skeptic" laughing her off the Extranet after getting fried alive and tossed into space by said threat.

Flipping through holos, several pads, hastily scrawled notes she'd long forgotten the means of, and occasionally looking at a picture of Liara (and subsequently getting lost in nostalgia and trying to fight off the urge to be in her bunk), an unwanted memory trip crept up...

...And she's back in Elysium City, researching every branch of science (and some that weren't supposed to exist). Physics, biology, chemistry, even psychology (and if the whining rocket scientists made heavy-handed, annoyingly unsubtle jokes "implying" that psychology was psuedoscience for losers trying to look smart, they were joining Dr. Lamarr in her lonely orbit around the planet).

Days were spent researching alien animals and avoiding feeding duty for the varren, finding cures for common and not-so-common diseases, making new chemicals for the Alliance and Turians for use in their multitudes of ships and body armor, new biotic implants and the pipe dream of true telekinesis, calculating and adjusting and producing experimental new cores that could run for centuries with just a pebble of eezo, new ships, new designs, a new everything, a better future, a brighter present.

Then the Blitz came.

Dr. Shepard had been on the top floor when the explosions rattled the building like tossing a soda can into Jupiter's storms. The usual response from her came – namely, screaming like a little schoolgirl, diving under her desk and hoping the mass effect fields would protect her from the rubble and that the earthquake would pass soon without real damage to the labs. Except it wasn't an earthquake, and the unmistakeable clatter of guns, lasers, and every sci-fi battle cliché in the book echoed through the building, along with her girly screaming.

When her brain managed to figure out that screaming wasn't the proper response to a terrorist attack, she remembered the weapons and armor research down at floor 89, took two absolutely massive Carnage pistols from a weapons locker, and tried to emulate Blasto as best as she could on the assorted pirates and mercs swarming everywhere.

It got her several nastily painful bleeding wounds to the knees, and she just managed to drag herself to the weapons/armor R&D floor before she bled out, and got herself into the combat suit she had helped designed (and unabashedly based off several cheesy, ridiculous 21-cent sci-fi video games and tabletop games), and pried a Mattock from a dead security guard.

Official reports that day claim she slaughtered fifty mercs in close-quarters combat, but not only was that bullshit (it was semi-auto, for God's sake, even a failed pacifist like her knew that was a bad idea in close combat), she spent most of the so-called "Battle for the Atat Research Institute" screaming, hiding behind still surviving security guards, firing blindly and managing to pop someone in the face by pure dumb luck, locking fellow co-workers into the escape pods and chutes for their safety, all that un-heroic stuff. They also claim she's the one who rigged floors 50-through-90 with eezo to take out the massed snipers and strike teams, but that was Dr. Koros' idea, and all she really did was see Dr. Koros scream obscenities, punch a pirate in the face, and activate his suicide vest.

When all was said and done, she made it out to the plaza, and much to her eternal relief, saw Alliance gunships and manned news drones fly overhead. She took off her helmet and squinted, and at about that time, that infamous, damned photo got taken.

The Alliance and Council shook her hand, patted her on the back, gave her honorary military medals for shooting living things and passed it off as an act of bravery, and when she asked for a quiet research facility on the Citadel with a greatly decreased risk of having to get shot at, they obliged.

She thought she was safe.

She was fucking wrong.


End file.
